45 Years ago these days the first men walked the Moon!!!

45 Years ago these days Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walked as the first humans on the lunar surface.

Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that landed the first humans on the Moon, Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on July 20, 1969, at 20:18 UTC. Armstrong became the first to step onto the lunar surface six hours later on July 21 at 02:56 UTC. Armstrong spent about two and a half hours outside the spacecraft, Aldrin slightly less, and together they collected 47.5 pounds (21.5 kg) of lunar material for return to Earth. A third member of the mission, Michael Collins, piloted thecommand spacecraft alone in lunar orbit until Armstrong and Aldrin returned to it just under a day later for the trip back to Earth.

 - From wikipedia

What an astonishing feat! I wasn't even born then, but I've seen the footage like a gazillion times, and it's still incredibly exciting to watch. 
They did what people for millennias had been telling stories about: They landed on the Moon! What these 3 guys did, was both to show us what we are capable of and how fragile we are. Just by turning the camera around from the surface on another world, and thereby showing us what an amazing and unbelieveable place we inhabit. I am still in awe... 

Thanks to Buzz, Neil and Michael! #Apollo45 

A New New Hope

Art by James Hance

Star Wars VII Rumors:

Even though some of my posts might suggest otherwise, I just love a good space opera. And I must admit that I'm the biggest sucker for Star Wars. I've always been since I saw for the first time it back in '78. Out of the theatre came a little chubby 7 years old old boy, who felt a veil had been removed from his eyes. 
I read every scifi book there was in the local library, and quickly learned to love Bradbury, Herbert and Asimov. It must have been around the same time I discovered Valérian and Laureline, which I've written about here.


So you can probably guess, that I'm quite excited about the new Star Wars - episode VII - even though I've learned not to get my hopes up too high. But then again - J.J. Abrams cannot possible screw up the Star Wars saga as George Lucas did. Geroge Lucas turned his own creation into the worst pile of pointless gobbledygook through bad directing and overusing VFX. It got so silly in the end (Episode I-III), that even though the designs and visuals in general were stunning, you consciousness never left the theatre while watching the movies.


SO Anyway: According to an article in io9.com article the thing that sets the whole plot in Star Wars VII in motion is Luke Skywalker's hand and lightsaber from The Empire Strikes Back.

The new heroes of the trilogy find it (played by Daisy Ridley and John Boyega), and they decide to return it (the hand too? A bit grose, but hey, so was Jar jar) to the proper people. They run into Han and Chewie, who recognize it as Luke's (the hand or the light sabre?), but they haven't seen Luke since Return of the Jedi (I knew it! Luke just couldn't cope with the fact, that he had a crush on his sis!)."Other details include an ice planet where evil people are building a weapon that can destroy whole solar systems. (Of all the things that survived the great EU purge, I was not expecting the Suncrusher to be one of them).

In many ways this plot of Episode VII is an echo of A New Hope. Instead of R2 coming to Tatooine it's a hand falling from the sky, but the basic sweep of the story is similar, and intentionally so. But things that seem familiar may not be as familiar as you think - don't assume that every ice or desert planet in the galaxy has already been visited, if you know what I'm saying. "

The original article at Badassdigest: here.
Article in io9: here.

AND don't forget to check out J.J. Abrams own little clips (Force for Change) here:

HALF A BILLION years old ancestors of arthropods found

I just love evolution - if that's possible at all to love a definition. 
But evolution is amazing! Think of all the endless possibilities of life there already has been, the ones that's here now and the ones that will come in the distant future. It really makes my head spin... 

Io9.com just featured this amazing article about these HALF A BILLION years old ancestors of spiders, shrimp and other arthropods. Or possible ancestors at least, since a lot of stuff happens during 500 mio. years. 

Anyone for squidditch? 

Anomalocarids - as they're called - are one of the oldest families of animals on Earth, and they truly looked like something thought up by the combined spawn of H.P.Lovecraft and H.R.Giger. 

From the io9 article:

The connection between anomalocarids and today's animals has long been a source of debate, and some paleontologists believed that there was no way to classify them properly. But thanks to Cong and his team, we have some strong evidence that arthropods — a group containing spiders, crabs, scorpions, and centipedes — are the distant descendants of these anomalocarids.A team of paleontologists led by Peiyun Cong found three gorgeously-preserved anomalocarid fossils in Yunnan Province, and described them today in Nature.

 The main overlap between the two groups, separated by 500 million years of evolution, is their brain structure. Arthropods have segmented, compartmentalized heads like anomalocarids. Plus, their brains connect to those "front appendages" which are called mouth flaps or antennae in today's arthropods. So both groups of creatures shared a very specific physical characteristic, which was a connection between those appendages and the brain.

-Illustration by Nicholas Strausfeld

And above, you can see a side-by-side comparison of one of the fossils (gray) witha a modern arthropod called an onychophoran or velvet worm (green). Long nerves from the frontal appendages extend to paired ganglia lying in front of the optic nerve and connect to the main brain mass in front of the mouth. Anomalocaridids had a pair of clawlike grasping appendages instead of feelers.
New fossil discovery of Anomalocarids actually contains traces of their brain structure — and amazingly, their half-billion-year-old brains look a lot like an arthropod's. Though some anomalocarids may have been as big as 7 feet long, these newly-discovered specimens are closer to the size of today's large insects.

Free Willyanomalocarid!!!!

If you found this interesting, you just might like my post on the origins of life on Earth too.

So just think about all the marvelous alien life there might be out there, beyond the deep, dark and dead vacuum of space, when you see what's been going on this tiny rock. 



Read the article at i09 here.
Read the full paper at Nature.

Simon Stålenhag

The feeling of reality kicking it's ugly boot through the door to the most sacred, most fantastic, most untouched of your childhood fantasies and stories is very strong in the works of Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag. 

The way he combines the most everyday items and locations with the fantastic is spectacular, and I must admit I've never seen anything like it.

Sometimes you're stuck with an image depicting enormous constructions falling apart, rusting and littering the countryside like leftovers from a huge saving-humanity-as-we-know-it experiment gone wrong. Or maybe even gone right, and this is what remains afterwards; A mess next to the highway that people has to pass in their everyday business. 

In our stories we always focus on the heroes, the scientists, the military men, the characters in the middle, but what would the world look like to the regular people after the threat was defeated, and life continued it's regular beat? Probably a lot like this...